Details emerge on Microsoft’s new web analytics tool

When Microsoft purchased the web analytics firm DeepMetrix last year, it was clear that Camp Redmond was looking to offer a product similar to Google Analytics. Over the last year, the DeepMetrix purchase seemed to fall off the map—or maybe we just forgot about it. Today, however, Microsoft refreshed our memories by releasing details about "Gatineau," a project based on the DeepMetrix software obtained in the acquisition.

Microsoft had to shelve its original plans to announce Gatineau Beta 1 a few weeks from now, primarily due to the fact that blogger Dave Naylor released screenshots of the tool which were somehow taken from a briefing at adChamps. Naylor's "leakage" of screenshots has now prompted a response from Redmond including details on the first beta.

According to Microsoft's Ian Thomas, Gatineau is in part similar to Google Analytics, but he stresses that "it's emphatically not our intention simply to replicate the functionality within that product." In the first beta, due by late summer, users will be able to separate their website's demographic data by age and gender. That data will come from users' Windows Live IDs, which Thomas says is strictly anonymous.

Questions are already being asked on Dave's blog about where we get this data from; the answer is that we do get this information from users' Live ID (formerly known as Microsoft Passport) profiles, but I would stress that we get this information anonymously, and there is no use of PII (Personally Identifiable Information, such as name or e-mail address) in the product.

Besides breaking data down into buckets, Gatineau also will give users basic information expected from a web analytics tool. That includes statistics and graphs pertaining to daily traffic, page views, entry pages, exit pages, and bounces. Graphs can also come in the form of pie charts, area charts, line charts, and stacked bar charts.

Though Thomas warns that the beta could be limited to only a select few users, he urges anyone wishing to try the beta to make the request via e-mail (available at his blog).